Unethical Agency Practices
By Frederic G. Reamer, PhD
Reprinted and Adapted with the permission of Social Work Today ©. Great Valley Publishing, Co.
Devi is a social worker who works for a social service agency. Her job entails making clinical assessments for subsidy applications.
Devi routinely submits her assessments to her supervisor, who often rewrites and edits the summaries, overturns some decisions, and gives final approval. However, the supervisor does not sign off on the assessments or indicate in the documentation that she participated in the report preparation or decision. Only Devi’s signature appears in the documentation.
Devi is concerned that her supervisor is misrepresenting the agency’s decision-making protocol by camouflaging the agency’s internal procedures. “Only my name appears in the final assessments even though in many cases it’s my supervisor who made the final decisions behind the scenes. Also, I think this process is just unethical,” said Devi. “It misrepresents how these important decisions are made.”
Many social workers have encountered instances when supervisors or administrators have asked or instructed them to participate in, condone, or overlook unethical practices. Examples include supervisors who ask social workers to exaggerate service utilization data supplied to funders, ignore eligibility criteria for agency services to enhance revenue, and alter client records in advance of a site visit conducted by an accreditation agency. In these instances, social workers must make difficult ethical judgments about how they will respond to unethical requests or mandates.
On the surface, social workers have a stark choice between looking the other way—perhaps to avoid angering a supervisor, stirring up controversy in the agency, jeopardizing the agency’s status, or losing their job—and challenging the unethical behavior as a matter of principle. It is easy, of course, to proclaim that social workers must always blow the whistle on ethical misconduct if more moderate efforts fail—for example, attempting to persuade supervisors and administrators to abandon their unethical course and adhere to prevailing ethical standards. In reality, however, agency-based politics and organizational dynamics are such that management of these ethical dilemmas requires considerable skill and nuance.
In my experience, supervisors who exercise their (usually legitimate) authority and prerogative to rewrite and, possibly, overturn subordinates’ decisions indicate that they have done so to make the sequence of actions and participating parties clear, especially in the event that questions arise or there is a formal challenge, litigation, and so on. This is normal administrative and supervisory accountability. Establishing this clear paper or digital trail is not only sound risk management, but supervisors have a fundamental ethical duty to conduct themselves in a way that avoids any appearance of impropriety, misrepresentation, deception, or fraud. Transparency is important.
Applying Ethical Standards
The NASW Code of Ethics includes several standards that pertain to instances when practitioners believe they have been asked or ordered to engage in or be associated with unethical activity. In principle, social workers should take assertive steps to challenge a supervisor’s alleged practices and take whatever measures they reasonably can to avoid participating in activities that may constitute unethical conduct, such as misrepresentation, deception, and fraud. According to the Code of Ethics, “Social workers should take adequate measures to discourage, prevent, expose, and correct the unethical conduct of colleagues”. Social workers cannot turn a blind eye from patently unethical behaviour.
The code also prescribes that “social workers should take reasonable steps to ensure that employers are aware of social workers’ ethical obligations as set forth in the NASW Code of Ethics and of the implications of those obligations for social work practice” (standard 3.09[c]). Thus, when feasible, social workers should alert people in positions of authority (e.g., senior administrators, members of a board of directors) about unethical practices within the organization. This may be politically awkward and uncomfortable, but it may be essential.
This step is important for three reasons.
First, in a strict moral sense, this is the right course of action. Ignoring wrongdoing poses a threat to clients and can undermine the organization’s ability to fulfill its mission.
Second, alerting people in positions of authority can minimize the organization’s legal exposure if disgruntled parties, such as clients or advocates, file a formal complaint or lawsuit.
Finally, assertive efforts to challenge wrongdoing help to protect social workers themselves, especially in the event that other parties allege that the social workers failed to take steps to expose unethical conduct within the organization.
Assertive action demonstrates social workers’ good-faith efforts to address wrongdoing.
This obligation is reinforced the Code of Ethics statement that “social workers should not allow an employing organization’s policies, procedures, regulations, or administrative orders to interfere with their ethical practice of social work. Social workers should take reasonable steps to ensure that their employing organizations’ practices are consistent with the NASW Code of Ethics”. In addition, “Social workers should not participate in, condone, or be associated with dishonesty, fraud, or deception”.
Morally upright and principled social workers sometimes face the unenviable task of responding to supervisors’ and administrators’ unethical instructions and behaviour. This is an unfortunate fact of organizational life. The challenge is managing these dilemmas with integrity and in a way that embraces relevant ethical standards. These are among the most difficult ethical circ*mstances that arise in social work. But social workers know well they cannot shy away from such difficult decisions. This kind of moral courage is part and parcel of being a professional.
As the British novelist and poet C. S. Lewis once said, “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”
